Titan - why such long NDA?

I find it really unprecedented for an "awaited" PC game to remain hidden from public. As far as I can tell, first signs of development go all the way back to '07, although it may have stayed in the "on paper" stage for a long time. Even if so, I believe developers have been reassigned around 2.5 (?) years ago, so by then there must have been a pretty clear concept at the very least.

I guess whatever Blizzard does, somebody has a problem with it. The game might constantly be changing and if they release any snippet of information that then doesn't hold true to the finished product it will be "Path of titans" incident all over again...

Didn't they start working on WoW in 2000 and it was 4 years to release? And back then there wasn't even such hype revolving around Blizzard games.

There is no reason to announce anything before they got something really really good to show off. It takes time to make an mmo. This game might not come out in the next 5 years, to prevent competition with wow.

If anything, Blizzard are trying to produce as much hype as possible. But not turn hype into boredom at the same time. Which calls for management of what they reveal, as a whole. Until May, Diablo III was their point of focus as a company. Before that, it was StarCraft's long awaited sequel. Now it's all about Mists of Pandaria. And after that, perhaps even after the release of the second part of StarCraft II, we will hear more about Titan, or whatever its name is going to be, I think.

What is more, if Titan is going to be as big a game as World of WarCraft, in size, then they must have a huge amount of work to do before the game is anywhere near a state that it can be shown, even teased, to the public. Even more than the workload of World of WarCraft, since development cycles have increased in size since then.

It's been taking so long I get the feeling they've scrapped it :P They could have hired a thousand programmers to code it, and it would've been finished by now. Or then it's just a very low priority, or D3 devs are on it now.

Until May, Diablo III was their point of focus as a company. Before that, it was StarCraft's long awaited sequel. Now it's all about Mists of Pandaria. And after that, perhaps even after the release of the second part of StarCraft II, we will hear more about Titan, or whatever its name is going to be, I think.

They've said time and time again that their focus is split rather than 1 project at a time though.

One very popular theory is that Titan is about an IP that will be under other studio for some time yet, and then released to Blizzard publish an MMO.
Since that IP is not property of Blizzard they legally must avoid any relation with it, even if their studios are filled with stuff from that.

Well, first, developing a new IP takes a very very long time if it should last (which I'm sure is Blizzard's goal).

Second, they probably wrote hundreds or thousands of design documents and coded lots of prototypes to test their design principles.

Just guessing, of course, I'm no insider... <.<
>.>

EDIT: And of course you have to draw the line where you talk about "a running project". Maybe the fans have just drawn this line a bit too early (because Blizzard fans are just insane!) compared to other similar projects.

Doom 4 was hinted in 2007, and announce May 2008. We haven't seen anything except the logo yet. Titan will be announced next year I think. I would have said this year as 5 years is a decent development time but there is no Blizzcon this year.

They've said time and time again that their focus is split rather than 1 project at a time though.

I meant as focus "to promote to the public eye". Development-wise, they are working on all kinds of things simultaneously. Their goal to me seems to be to establish each game, and create some flow-over from each other. But, in matters of publicity, have one upcoming game or expansion of a game, at the spotlight each time. Their big summer announcement of sorts, usualy at Blizzcon. So maybe they will reveal something next summer.

It's better this way, where people can just randomly speculate but not get too invested, rather than 'omg they promised x feature but now it's been scrapped, YOU LIED TO US BLIZZTARD FFS'.

This way the hype is being 'safely' generated. We know it's out there, rumours are spreading, but nobody is getting too emotionally invested. Blizzard will release info when they have something solid to show us. Patience!